Indro Montanelli
Encyclopedia : I : IN : IND : Indro Montanelli
Indro Montanelli (April 22, 1909, Fucecchio, province of Florence - July 22, 2001, Milan) was an Italian journalist and historian, known for his new approach to writing history in books such as History of the Greeks and History of Rome.
Born in Fucecchio, near Florence, Montanelli made his career at the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Milan, famously authoring deeply sympathetic articles from Finland during the Russo-Finnish War (part of World War II), and from Hungary, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In the 1970s, together with Enzo Bettiza, he founded and directed the Milan daily Il Giornale.
When Silvio Berlusconi, the proprietor of Il Giornale, entered politics and founded the new right-wing party, Forza Italia, Montanelli came under heavy pressure to switch his editorial line to a position favourable to Berlusconi. Montanelli never hid his bad opinion of Berlusconi: "He lies as he eats", the journalist declared. In the end, protesting his independence, he founded a new daily, for which he resurrected the name La Voce ("The Voice"), which had belonged to an historical newspaper run by Giuseppe Prezzolini. La Voce, always an elitist paper, folded after about a year, and Montanelli returned to Corriere della Sera.
From 1995 to 2001 he was the chief letters editor of Corriere della Sera, answering a letter a day on a page of the newspaper known as ‘La Stanza di Montanelli’ (‘Montanelli’s Room’). In spite of having been a renowned anti-Communist all his life, Montanelli spent his last years vigorously opposing Silvio Berlusconi’s politics.
He died on July 22 2001 at the ‘La Madonnina’ clinic in Milan, where another legendary Corriere della Sera writer, Dino Buzzati, had died twenty-nine years earlier. The following day, Corriere della Sera published a letter on its front page: Indro Montanelli's farewell to his readers.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.